Wednesday, October 30, 2013

This Week In Tickets: 21 October 2013 - 27 October 2013

Four movies worth writing about last week. Would have been more, but baseball and birthdays and such. I honestly don't know what I'll do with my evenings in a couple of days when the World Series is over.

Stubless: Machete Kills, 27 October, 1:20pm. Actually, I have a stub, but after the first false start, the theater gave us all free passes, and after the third, they admitted that the movie just wasn't going to run and refunded our money. Or, since I paid with MoviePass, handed over another free pass.

The kind of funny thing about the whole thing was that when the sound cut out during the "Machete Kills Again... In Space!" fake trailer, nobody in the audience really stirred; we figured it might just be part of the fake-wear stuff from Grindhouse, where the Machete movies got started - it wasn't until things were silent during the main feature that that we knew something wasn't right and someone went for a manager. She and the projectionist tried valiantly to get the movie started, subjecting us to the previews for Neighbors and the Robocop remake three times, but eventually they gave up.

There's a rant from folks like myself who love 35mm on how digital sucks here, but I'm not going to make it; I spent a good chunk of Thursday and Friday at work trying to figure out why running the same data through the same code on the same hardware was producing different results, so I sympathize entirely.

As for what did wind up getting seen, it was a pretty good week. I used the extra day off between playoff rounds to catch up with Captain Phillips on Monday; I thought it was pretty good, but did come in with a chip on my shoulder in its favor due to some weird ranting about it that I'd heard before. Tuesday's Gathr preview was Autoluminescent: Rowland S. Howard, a standard for-the-fans rock documentary which is fairly unusual in focusing on the music.

Then there was baseball to watch Wednesday and Thursday, while Friday's choice was in part necessitated by my shopping for a niece's seventh birthday party. Still, unlike most cases when choosing by location and start time often settles you with a dud, I liked All Is Lost quite a bit.

It was a near thing getting to that birthday party - while it's normally a straight shot from my house near Central Square to South Station to catch the bus to Portland, there was work on the Red Line, so one stop on the train to Kendall, two on a shuttle bus taking a weirdly circuitous route to get to Park, and then two more on the train to South. It was a little late getting into Portland, and nobody had received my Facebook message saying I was coming (unusual, as most of the time I get messages from someone after opening the app for ten seconds on my phone), so I wound up taking a cab to my brother's house. It was fun to surprise them, at least, and I got to hang out with my brother, parents, and Awesome Nieces for the afternoon. I was psyched to see how excited Dagny and her friends were at the telescope I got her (little girls loving science is cool), amused at how they passed around another gift to show how heavy it was for the size, and relieved when I saw her open things from other friends and relatives that I had considered and then put back. Awkwardness averted!

I hung around there long enough that I missed the first couple innings of Saturday night's loss, and after the Machete Kills-related misadventures on Sunday, I made sure the DVR grabbed its game so that I could see Haunter at the Somerville Theatre as part of the Terror Thon. It's the only thing I made it to outside the actual marathon, but I'm willing to bet that Vincenzo Natali's new movie was the best of the bunch.

After that, I went radio-silent on the internet to avoid spoilers, and reached the end of the week. As much as I don't want this Red Sox series to end, I've got to admit that it will be nice to be able to see movies every night again as some of the good stuff starts arriving for awards season.